The next Zionist revolution: Economist

The next Zionist revolution: Economist

Apr 3rd 2008

Zionism is nearly twice as old as Israel. The debate about what it means continues to shape the country

It's all right, you don't have to stay

THERE is “an ethical problem”, says Mr Yehoshua, the novelist, when religion and nationality are bound up as one, as they are for the Jews. In biblical times, during the period of the second temple in Jerusalem, religious and nationalist interests often clashed, most notably when religious zealots started an unwinnable uprising against the Roman occupation that led to the destruction of the temple and the start of 2,000 years of diaspora. But diaspora, suggests Mr Yehoshua, allowed the Jews to escape the internal contradictions of a state run on religious lines.

Israel's birth, however, recreated a Jewish nationalist framework based on land, language, culture and everyday life. And once again it is in conflict with demands rooted in religious belief. To avoid repeating the cycle, argues Mr Yehoshua, nationalism and religion have to be disconnected. He calls this separation “the next challenge of the Zionist revolution”.

Like it or not, Zionism is Israel's official ideology and will probably remain so as long as Jews are in the majority there. But it has always been a mishmash of evolving and often conflicting ideas rather than a coherent creed. The secular socialist Zionism of the state's founders is no longer in vogue. To today's haredim a Zionist state means one that upholds Jewish law; to the religious-Zionist settlers, one that returns the Jewish people to all of their biblical lands; to the secular left, a state that is democratic and liberal yet manages to maintain a Jewish majority. Others champion secondary goals for Zionism, like setting an example in what Jews call tikkun olam (“world repair”, ie, do-gooding). Mr Jabareen, the Palestinian-Israeli lawyer, argues that the Israeli left's current weakness stems from its inability to resolve the increasingly visible contradiction between being a Jewish and being a democratic state, whereas the right is happy to resolve it in favour of being Jewish.

Jews outside Israel, meanwhile, are questioning all the traditional Zionist assumptions about what the country should mean to them. Israel as the gravitational centre of the Jewish world? Not necessarily, say the Jews of America, who are about equally numerous. Israel as a hothouse of Jewish spiritual and cultural life? It is more diverse here, say Jews in America, where Orthodox rabbis lack the hegemony they have in Israel; growing faster here, say Jews in Russia, where the proselytising Lubavitch movement has engineered a post-Soviet resurrection of Jewish life; more vibrant here, say Jews in western Europe, where these days lots of non-Jews are studying Hebrew, Yiddish, Torah and Jewish cultural history. Israel as a Jewish safe haven? You must be joking, say Jews almost everywhere, eyeing the rest of the Middle East.

As a result, traditional forms of Jewish support for Israel are changing. Some of the wealthy foreign Jews whose names adorn almost every Israeli university building, museum wing, hospital ward and public garden now wonder if this is the best use for their money. American Jews raised over $340m in emergency aid during the 2006 Lebanon war, but Isaac Devash, an Israeli philanthropist and entrepreneur, argues that they need to stop compensating for the state's failings and instead strengthen it by strengthening the society that upholds it. One of his own projects, Atidim, helps bright people from poor areas get a good education so they can go back and revitalise their home towns. Sizeable Jewish donations also support Arab-Israeli advocacy groups like Mr Jabareen's Adalah.

For its part, Israel is starting to rethink what it expects of the diaspora. Ze'ev Bielsky, the chairman of the Jewish Agency, the main body responsible for promoting aliyah—Jewish immigration—still claims to believe in a goal set in 2001 of attracting a million new immigrants by 2020, which would mean quadrupling the current immigration rate with immediate effect (in fact, last year it reached its lowest level in 20 years). It is the kind of fantasy that sets some diaspora Jews' teeth on edge. But behind the scenes Mr Bielsky's agency and the government are also discussing a new “partial aliyah”. This would allow people to enjoy most of the benefits of citizenship but still spend the majority of their time abroad, and allow Israel to reap the most from a globalised workforce.

Can Zionism evolve enough to allow Israel's non-Jewish citizens to feel truly part of the country? Mr Yehoshua envisages that with time, the growth of an inherently Israeli, post-diaspora culture could permit the separation of church and state. Arab-Israelis, while maintaining their own distinct culture, would then feel they belonged to Israel as much as British Jews, say, feel they belong to Britain. But that, he says, is “in the distant future”. And it certainly will not happen unless Israel can ease its other problems: the structural weaknesses in the economy, the wealth gaps, the social divides and, most importantly, the conflicts with its neighbours.

An end and a beginning

“The first Israeli republic has outlasted itself,” says Yehezkel Dror, whose two visions of the future opened this report. But he is less sure what a new system might look like. Mr Dror opposes enshrining Israel's current contradictions in a constitution; he believes that the continuing debate about what the country should be is “a source of strength; it encourages creativity.” But, he acknowledges, “in politics it leads to a blocked society.”

It is this blockage, not Palestinian missiles or an Iranian nuclear bomb, that is the main threat to Israel's well-being. As this report has argued, Israel's survival in the long term will depend on decisions taken in the near future, which will make the difference between growth and stagnation, harmony and social strife, intelligent self-defence and self-destructive belligerence. To take the right decisions it needs a system that reduces the power of special-interest groups without riding roughshod over minorities and allows long-term goals to override short-term politics.

Can it create this system in time? Looking at today's political quagmire, it seems doubtful. Mr Dror notes that the first few decades of American history were beset by ideological struggles as intense as those in Israel, and that it took a civil war to begin to resolve them. So he remains an optimist: “Sixty years is nothing.”

.